


And the Mountains Were My Only Home

by Coconut_Gelato



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Goat Farm, Hate Crimes, Inspired by Real Events, farming
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-21
Updated: 2019-10-21
Packaged: 2020-12-27 19:15:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21123827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Coconut_Gelato/pseuds/Coconut_Gelato
Summary: You are a seasoned farmer living on the outskirts of the town that is now infamous for hosting the first above-ground monster population. You farm your vegetables, feed your animals, bake your bread, ferment your cheese, and the salt of the earth dries the skin beneath your fingernails. The matters of monsters and men concern you so very little, until a bunch of rednecks dump one on your doorstep.You get to decide if he lives or dies.





	And the Mountains Were My Only Home

**Author's Note:**

> My take on a Grillby/Reader. I don't know how to describe this, but I'm trying to capture what it feels like to see a situation that makes perfect sense to a drunk person through the eyes of a less drunk one. No offence to anyone but myself. I personally enjoy Grillby/Reader; all their wonderful authors have been an inspiration on lonely days. Emotions are just embarrassing.
> 
> This is simply me exploring new ground, trying a new angle on telling a romantic story in a second-person point-of-view.

A bleating scream pierced the dark. Your teeth clench harder on the steel cylinder of your torchlight, strong and firm hands holding the wailing goat steady. Fat beads of sweat run down your tense jaw and drip off the chin, mingling with spit running from your bottom lip and splattering onto the golden hay below.

"Easy now, good girl," you mutter as best you could when the goat stopped kicking. It came out distorted around the torch, sounding more like "Eahee how, goo' girh." Your tone was not unkind, but the shaking of your hands betrayed the many hours of strain they'd suffered helping the goat deliver its first kids. 

Fifteen hours. Nancy, the last of your farm's heavily pregnant goats, had been at this for fifteen hours. Two hours since she started pushing. Frustration crawls its way up your chest. There were so many reasons why a goat labor would take so long, and with the weather threatening to let loose the worst storm of the season, you doubt the local doctor would be willing to come over to help out with any of those reasons. Dr. Blebil was probably already asleep by now anyway.

As gently as possible, you insert two fingers inside the goat's entrance once more, feeling a resigned sort of dismay when you couldn't feel the amniotic sac.

  
  


Damn him, he said this would be an easy birth. Damn  _ yourself  _ for asking a people doctor instead of sucking it up and driving to the next town for a vet. To give him credit, though, he was right about the other three goats.

Nancy's eyes were glazed over where she lay shuddering on the pile of hay you had prepared only yesterday, breathing heavy and wet with spittle, occasionally releasing a few tortured bleats. Red-tinged foam dribbled out her birth canal when you dig deeper inside to find out what the hell was obstructing the kids from coming out.

  
  


When you glanced back up to rub off your face sweat on the shoulder of your shirt, you notice small hooves pressing and protruding underneath the skin of Nancy's stomach. At least two kids, you conclude. 

You grit your teeth in frustration as you directed your gaze back between the goat's legs and move the udders out of the way for what feels like the thousandth time. It left a smear of blood, like one of the many macabre finger paintings you used to make with your nosebleeds in kindergarten.

Then you felt it. A wet fleshy ball! When you push further, earning an upset bleat from Nancy (you force your movements to be gentler), you feel a second- a third even further up! Oh  _ shit _ .

Thunder claps and it shakes the rickety barn from ground up, but no rain is coming forth yet. There are strange sounds coming from outside though, somewhat like a roaring engine. Howling winds. You couldn't tell the difference and can't quite care at the moment, actually, because you have finally realized the source of the problem.

The kids probably all tangled up in there. Number one and two are clogging up the exit, and that's the first problem to solve. 

You pinch the first amniotic sac pull it a little more forward, stopping the progress of the other one, and tear it open with a twist. It burst. Fluid splattered everywhere. On your face, your blood-stained apron, _inside_ your _mouth. _You roll the slim torch to the side of your mouth and spit to the side without missing a beat. Nancy immediately turns around to lick up the mess, but you firmly nudge her head out of the way.

Number one is coming out head first. You adjust the head, grab the two little hooves and  _ pull _ . The first kid slides out like a champ, forcing his siblings a little backward. You wrap him in a thick woolly towel, swing him back and forth to clear his lungs, then checked for breathing all in quick succession. The wind was just beginning to howl louder when you deliver the second. It sounded garbled and muffled through the rattling barn doors.

However, as all things like to go horribly wrong when victory is close, you discover that the third kid is stuck. You pull, adjust, and pull, while Nancy bleats, convulses and kicks in misery while drooling white froth all over the hay. 

Big problem. Kid was in breech position.  _ Fuck this shit,  _ you curse, when you catch a kick to your temple from Nancy dearest. But the kid's resistance was beginning to give. You rub Nancy's stomach to make sure the hooves weren't dragging-

_ Nancy in labour with her third kid_

The barn doors burst open and swing off its hinges, slamming hard on the ground next to you. You jolt in surprise. Nancy screamed and bolted, the kid half hanging out of her and and and  _ god fucking dammit _ it was  _ suffocating-  _

"Nanshy!" The torch falls out of your mouth when you lunge forward to catch your stupid goat. But then you hear it once more; the sound you initially dismissed as howling gales. 

How could you have been so wrong? No, they were screams. Crackling screams that sounded nothing remotely human, and roaring laughter over the sound of a tractor throwing up mud. Your dogs were wide awake and barking in their kennels, a few of them pulling against their chains among the chaos of sounds.

You whip around. 

Oh, god. You recognize that truck. Red. Loud. Popping a gasket. The Billy brothers are up to no good again…...HOLY SHIT, they’re  _ dragging a man on fire _ behind their truck! 

You jump to your feet like Satan himself lit a bonfire under your ass and throw open a wooden chest nailed to the barn wall. That's where you stored your hunting rifle, for emergencies. You daresay this is a fucking emergency. You dash out of the barn just as they hit the gas right out of your line of vision and aimed, using their car lights for vision. 

The plan, you think on the fly, is to shoot off the trunk lid handle where the rope or chain or whatever is tied to.

**BANG!**

"Fucktard." You hiss.

The first shot went wide. You cussed yourself out again for overestimating the wind speed outside.  _ Fuckfuckfuckfuckity fuck,  _ you were a better shot than this. You could have hit the victim! Isn't it bad enough that he got set on fire by redneck hooligans?!

No, no,  ** _no_ ** . This isn’t the time for hysterics.

You hold your breath and sink to one knee. Muddy water seeps ice cold through your pants, but you ignore it. The butt of your rifle presses hard to the inside of your shoulder. No more mistakes. 

Your target gets smaller and smaller by the second, and the man getting dragged has stopped screaming. You chase away the disturbing implications from your mind. Your arm muscles constrict to force the fatigued tremors within to still. 

With both eyes open, you peer through the rifle scope, took aim and

tightened

the

trigger.

* * *

Grillby was going to die, he’s sure of it. Getting tied to a truck and dragged for miles on end ‘til almost every inch of their skin was scraped raw would do that to a person, he supposes.

Those bastards didn't even have the courtesy to tie both of his legs to the back of their truck when they ambushed him, and now his left leg was bent at an awkward angle as the chain pulled on his right ankle, dragging him across the gravel at a hundred kilometers per hour. 

He was lifting his upper torso the best he could, protecting his head with hideously damaged arms- he's forgotten the last time he's seen this much dust on his person- but it had the unfortunate effect of grating his back on the rough road even more. And when he fell on his side, the already prominent wounds on his skin burned with a flame hotter than he could ever make.

Screaming didn't help, because there was no one here on the outskirts of the town- not that he could notice, at least, he was too busy trying to make sense of up or down amidst the excruciating pain.

A harrowing shriek even worse than the bastards' laughter pierced the air once more, and he absently recognized it as his own. It didn't sound real. _That can't be me._ _I don't sound like that. _He caught a glimpse of a snail trail of white ash leading all the way up to his body, being painted from underneath him like he was a juicy paintbrush and the road a dark gray canvas. _That can't be mine, _he insisted to himself, _its too much. Too long, stretching too far. There’s no way I could have lost that much and still be awake._

He didn't know why it was so much easier to think all of a sudden. The pain was getting better too. Strange, the night was getting darker now……

**bang**

That sounded kind of faint. Whatever that was, he doesn't care about anything, just sleep. He has to sleep.

**BANG!**

** _clang_ **

** _chink_ **

Grillby's flew open. Well, as much as it was willing to anyway. His momentum had him skidding forward a little further before stopping.

The last thing he saw before blacking out was an off-white clad figure in the rapidly fading lights, covered in bloodstains and swinging a gun in its rubber-gloved hands. Which were also bloodstained.

The figure immediately ran over and started viciously beating out his weakened flames with its smelly rags.

_ Good grief,  _ one last thought rang in Grillby's head. He's really starting to hate humans.  
  


* * *

_ A fire monster. _

That's exactly what is laying before you now. Not a dude on fire, but a dude  _ of  _ fire, lying half dead on the roadside and bent in awkward angles. 

You've never actually met one before. In fact, you were half-convinced the whole thing was an elaborate joke staged by the nearby town in a desperate attempt to attract more tourists when they declared the big news on TV. MONSTERS WALK AMONG US! The headlines screamed in the evening news broadcast. It was especially unbelievable when these so-called monsters claimed they could do magic and declared a shrimpy human child as their ambassador. 

However, there were other…... less savory…... rumors you've heard about these monsters. That they were larger and taller than the average man, fierce and able to do incredible feats of witchcraft. There was even talk about them being so technologically advanced compared to humans that one monster scientist invented a sentient robot with its own thoughts, feelings and desires. Personally, you think robots like that are scarier than any monster. But you had to admit, it was hard not to see a grain of truth behind their fear-fueled reasoning. You're a practical woman who's looking to survive in this harsh, cruel world, and you’ve got to look out for your own best interests. 

Heaven knows no one else will. Wrangling a farm all on your own after your grandpa's death taught you that.

But here's a monster right now before your ugly industrial-yellow galoshes. And you can't help but want to save him; because all you see is a person whose life is in your hands.

You weren;t sure if this was important, but there was dust all over his person. You hoped he was just hiding a lot of chalk in his pockets and that dust isn't the monster equivalent of blood, because if it was, the fire man's got the odds stacked against his survival. Nobody deserves to die like this. Alone, in pain, in the company of a stranger in the middle of nowhere.

You bend down to check for breathing, feeling a warm heat wash over your cold damp skin from your proximity to the fire man.

You watch the rise and fall of his chest. Faint, like his flickering flames. Ragged, like what remained of his dapper bartender or waiter outfit. But definitely still there, and not showing signs of stopping anytime soon. Your eyes run over the rest of him. For something made of fire, his body was surprisingly… defined, from the curves of his waist to his exposed collarbones and the muscles clenching in his jaw. Well, it moved like muscle, anyways. Or were you just projecting your human characteristics on this strange elemental creature? It’s very dark, after all. His flames were the only light in the pitch black surrounding the both of you. No stars or moon tonight, just you and this living, breathing bonfire.

God, but he looked dangerous. 

You feel a drop of icy rain hit your skin, raising goosebumps. The wind picked up, whistling in your ears. In half a heartbeat you catch a flash of lightning overhead, and the rumbling thunder that chases it vibrates your organs to the very core. A few more pinpricks of rain followed, and you knew in a matter of seconds, the worst rainstorm of spring will come down upon you with all the fury of a scorned god.

You stare at the flickering man before you, his flames hissing and spitting at every raindrop that touched his skin. No doubt about it. He will die out here in the storm, even if he weren't made of fire. You know it sounds cold, but for the briefest of moments, you wonder if you can literally wash your hands of this sticky situation by leaving him there.

Then the rain fell hard all of a sudden and you got your head out of your asshole fantasy to chuck your apron over the man's face and heave his surprisingly warm body into your arms. 

"Wilbur!" You screech and whistle. In a matter of seconds, one of your dogs, specifically the one most skilled at slipping out of his collar, peeked his head out of the house where he liked to hide in when he got loose. He didn't even have the decency to look ashamed at being found out. Well, it doesn't matter now. You can hardly be angry at him for it in your current situation.

"Fetch gun!" You roar, practically sprinting to the house now. Your dog immediately obeys and scampers out, leaving the door wide open. 

Goddammit, the fiery man's exposed skin was turning to dust right before your eyes! His flames were getting worryingly dimmer as well, and that sent enough panic in you to go even faster despite the dull, increasingly excruciating ache in your lungs and leg muscles

If he dies, you realise, it's on you. 

Well then he's not going to fucking die. 

"You're not going to fucking die!" You yell at him. The rectangle of light that was your door was getting closer and closer. "Don't die, do you hear me? We're almost there! We're almost fucking there!"

In one last burst of strength and an inhuman warcry that added DETERMINATION to your screaming muscles, your fling the both of you inside through the tiny ass doorway and land on your knees in the corridor where you keep your shoes. Wilbur dashes in after you with your rifle, plops the weapon down and considerately closes the door after himself.

No time for breaks. You haul your ass off the floor and stagger to the sofa. Warm he may be, but he's not burning you, so he can't burn the couch either. Which is where you lay him on as gently as you could. You position his legs on the armrest and throw the damp apron off of him. Dry rags. You need dry rags.

Your trembling feet stumbled drunkenly into the kitchen. Just as you bend over to open the rags cabinet, your knees give way and you fall onto the garish orange and white checkered tiles, catching your breath with deep, shuddering gasps.

Just as the edges of your vision begin to blacken, you feel something cold and wet touch your face.

Your eyes flicker open to see Wilbur sniffing your temple. His nose came away red. You guess Nancy kicked harder than you thought; you must be bleeding all over your face.

Your hand curled around the Wilbur's neck to hold his head away from you, gently pressing him to the crook of your neck and rubbing the back of his ear fondly. "Good boy," you wheeze. You couldn’t have done it without him. “You’re a good boy, Wilbur, good boy,” you repeat like a mantra. He sits down and proceeds to lie on your lap, and you continue to caress his damp, glossy fur from the head and along his spine, and back to the head, occasionally throwing in a gentle scratch behind the ears. His big brown eyes look up at you with love.

Oblivious to your lightheadedness, Wilbur’s whip-like tail wagged like a windshield wiper, basking in the attention and spraying rainwater all over the kitchen floor. You’re not surprised. Wilbur’s the attention whore of your dog pack and is all too willing to indulge in the extra affection you were giving him.

_Wilbur, Mimi, Parker, Sheba, Lassie, Brongo, Brandy and Lily_

Once you felt less like passing out, you lift yourself off the tiles and grabbed some rags, much to Wilbur's disappointment. There was work to be done.

You won't be getting any sleep tonight.

**Author's Note:**

> Image sources: https://www.dummies.com/home-garden/hobby-farming/raising-goats/goat-labor-and-birth/, https://365psd.com/istock/pack-of-running-dogs-10995


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